Tod Hanson's installation suggests the party has been and gone. Bits of tatty streamers are strewn across the floor and hang limply down walls. It could be the day after an election rally or perhaps the result of an earthquake. Those bits of paper don't look quite so celebratory close up. Called Parlour Collider (2006), this sprawling installation combines a shoddy DIY aesthetic with Rococo design. Painted floorboards lead to a luminescent yellow room, pulsing with colour like a UFO. Inspired by computer games, the auteur Stanley Kubrick - in particular his film Barry Lyndon - and the 18th-century painter Hogarth, Hanson creates a kind of stage set in which the audience become the unwitting actors in an unknown drama.JL

· Cell Project Space, E2, Sat 2 to Jan 14

Christine BorlandEdinburgh

Christine Borland creates a kind of 3D poetics of mortality and somehow carries it off without a shade of sensationalist morbidity or melodramatic posturing. In the mid-1990s she discovered that it was perfectly possible to buy up human skeletons by mail order. Resultant works here include the fragile outline of one such skeleton meticulously traced in dust on a glass shelf. There's also her Bullet Proof Breath, a blown-glass sculpture of a human bronchia. She promises to present more memento mori using apples fallen from the very tree that triggered Newton's scientific inspiration.RB

· Fruitmarket Gallery, to Jan 28

Ben McLaughlinLondon

Long shadows, moonlit waters and empty spaces, the paintings of Ben McLaughlin are moody and atmospheric and speak of angst. Figures loiter by swimming pools and stare out at bleak landscapes. The titles are chosen from the news, injecting gritty reality into this introspection. Inspired by cinematic moments and Edward Hopper - chronicler of urban alienation - McLaughlin's paintings are a sight for the worldly weary.JL

· Gallery 27, W1, Tue 5 to Dec 9

Rose Finn-KelceyMilton Keynes

Witty, spiritually uplifting artworks by the British artist Rose Finn-Kelcey, whose public sculptures seek to disrupt the drudge of everyday life. In works like It Pays To Pray, chocolate vending machines that dispense prayers, and a wish-o-meter that lights up positive answers for the religiously bankrupt, Finn-Kelcey combines humour and pathos to bring her audience a little bit of love in these turbulent times. This exhibition - her first comprehensive one in 10 years - continues her fascination for symbols. Using Chinese characters, text messaging, street signage and the glitzy sparkle of fairground art, Finn-Kelcey creates a number of installations inspired by a recent trip to China.JL

· Milton Keynes Gallery, to Jan 28

ts BeallManchester

As a pioneer of early 19th-century photography, Edward Muybridge famously photographed a galloping horse with multiple stop action cameras, thus for the first time accurately revealing how a horse moved. In 1969 the sculptor Jannis Kounellis notoriously placed 11 real live horses in a Rome gallery and titled the installation Untitled (Cavalli). Now, with her site-specific installation Untitled Horses, ts Beall makes obvious reference to both of these historic interplays between real raw life and staged event or representational image. Beall placed two unbridled thoroughbred horses in the somewhat restrained Castlefield space and let them claustrophobically roam while being filmed by a number of fixed view cameras. So, the resultant footage, with sound further manipulated by composer Mary Bellamy, is, presumably, presented as a further take on the whole historical quandary of the found and created art object.RC

· Castlefield Gallery, to Jan 28

Nick CroweManchester

Propaganda images of the Iraq war, taken from the MoD website, are painstakingly engraved in glass, neatly set on shelves and spotlit to emanate a spectral glow. Nick Crowe deals in the effect on realty of virtual reality, and vice-versa. A set of some 68 headless glass effigies are suspended like a spooky mobile to commemorate the equal number of 21st-century victims of beheading that the artist traced through the internet. Crowe has rescued glass engraving from the realms of the ornamental mantelpiece and wielded it as a medium of tense ambivalence, both rigid and fragile, dangerously impenetrable and transparently delicate. With Crowe, the fine techniques it affords are redolent as much of hi-tech circuitry as of picturesque filigree. This knowing reversal of urban/rural expectations is most clearly exercised here in The Campaign For Rural England, a civic bus shelter with its windows shattered into a baroque mosaic.RC

· Cornerhouse, to Jan 28

Andrea ZittelLondon

Andrea Zittel is a Spartan zealot, an antidote to our consumer excesses. She lives in an ergonomic box in Joshua Tree, California, wears a uniform and makes art from waste paper and detritus left by tourists on the desert trail. It's a puritanical life and one she started in the early 1990s when she fabricated living units inside dingy warehouses that she rented in New York as a way of personalising spaces that were not hers. The homes are simple and beautifully made of stacked boxes, each incorporating a room of tiny proportions, some of which you have to crawl through. A combination of Bauhaus minimalism with the Japanese mania for economical living, Zittel's utopian living conditions are inspired by her desire for a better life. This exhibition features the artworks made while living in Joshua Tree.JL